“Are you owed wages?” Nell asked.
“Nell,” I said.
“That is what she means, isn’t it?”
Bessie looked at my daughter, then at me. “Two pounds ten.”
Ada drew her hands into her lap. The joints had stiffened while we ate; I could see her trying to fold one set of fingers over the other. “I asked William to send it. There has been some confusion.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
For the first time that evening the title sounded like a door shutting.
I had no wish to turn my dining room into a tribunal. Mr Harcourt had laid down his knife and fork to get a better view. Mrs Keene, who had come in late and had until then been quietly removing the pepper Ada had put on her cabbage, reached for the gravy.
“This is very good, Mrs Bellamy,” she said. “Is there any left in the kitchen?”
She had never asked for a second helping in four years. I could have kissed her.
“I’ll bring it through. Ada, will you help me? Bessie, finish your supper.”
My sister got to her feet at once. The relief in the movement hurt worse than an argument would have done. She believed I was coming to her rescue, and of course in one sense I was.
In the kitchen she put both hands flat against the table.
“You must not make too much of this. William has been away. I had thought the money settled.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
“And the week before?”
Her head came up. “I know what you’re doing.”
“I am asking when you thought it settled.”
“You enjoy it when I make a mistake.”
That was true often enough to make me pause. As a girl I had liked nothing better than finding Ada’s ribbon tied badly, a sum wrongly added in her schoolbook, some small failure in the smooth progression which took her from the best place at the table to the best place in a room. Later there had been her husband and my husband, her house and my house, her freedom to take a carriage when it rained and my decision whether to ruin my boots or spend a penny. At some unflattering level I had expected virtue to arrange itself according to those differences.
“Not this mistake,” I said.
She turned her head towards the dining-room door. The voices had begun again. Mr Harcourt was explaining something; Mrs Wetherby was allowing him to finish before she corrected it.
“I didn’t have two pounds ten with me.”
I took the three sovereigns out of my pocket and put them on the table. Ada flinched, as if I had thrown them.
“That was put aside for you.”
“What was put aside for her?”
“If you ask him for two things at once, William sees only an invitation to question both.”
She said it quietly. She had never, in all the years of her marriage, told me so much about her husband in one sentence.
I left the coins where they were. “Then you need to speak to her.”
“I shall.”
“Tonight.”
“Eleanor, I cannot produce money I do not have.”
“You can produce an apology.”
We stood looking at one another beside the stove. Ada had taken off her hat and her hair showed a flat place where the pins had pressed. I wanted suddenly to lay a hand against her head, the way I had when she came home from school with a tooth knocked loose and our mother had said she must have been doing something rough to deserve it. But she would have thought I pitied her. Perhaps I did.
Instead I picked up the gravy and went back into my dining room.
The apology was not graceful. Ada gave it while standing behind Bessie’s chair, which made it sound at first like a request that she move. When she had finished explaining about William, Bessie waited.
“I am sorry,” Ada added.
“Thank you.”
“It will be attended to on Tuesday.”
“Then I will come on Tuesday.”
Ada blinked. “But I need you tomorrow.”
“I need to pay Mrs Webb.”
It was said without anger. Bessie was thirty-one, and I suspected she had discovered that anger required resources of its own. She ate the last of her potato. The fact that she would finish it, in the silence of all those people, made me like her more than a dozen brave speeches could have done.
After supper she washed her hands in the scullery, collected her coat and asked whether there was anything she could carry to the corner for me. She had worked through an evening which no one had called work until she asked to be paid for it.
“Wait a moment,” I said.
In my bedroom I took one sovereign from the table where I had left the money, wrapped it in paper and came back down.
“A pound towards what you are owed. Mrs Fenwick will repay me.”
“Mrs Bellamy, I wasn’t asking you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know if she will.”
I almost said that Ada was my sister. It would have been a poor answer to someone who had spent five weeks discovering precisely what that guaranteed.
“I have been paid for the rooms,” I said. “I can lend it until Tuesday.”
Bessie looked at the paper in my hand. Her cheeks had grown a little red. “I’d like to write you a receipt.”
“There’s no need.”
“I’d like to.”
I brought her a pen. She sat at the little hall table where the post went, wrote the date, the sum and what it was for. Her hand was careful rather than fine. At the end she put her full name: Elizabeth Ward.
“Bessie isn’t what’s on your letters,” I said.
“My mother calls me Elizabeth when something has happened. Most other people don’t bother.”
She blotted the paper, thanked me and left. I watched until she had turned the corner, one shoulder raised against the rain. The house behind me had become a very different place from the one I had let that afternoon, although nothing in it had yet been broken.
Arthur was in the sitting room with Nell when I went back. Ada had arranged the women around the dining table with tea and the parcels. My daughter and her fiancé were alone beneath the light, looking at a piece of blue cloth.
“The curtains,” Nell said. “For the room Arthur has found.”
I felt a foolish stab. They had shown me samples before, but this piece was larger, a square large enough to mean a window. Through that window my daughter would look at a street I would not see every morning.
Arthur stood. He was a pleasant, narrow-shouldered young man who always polished his boots before calling. I had first taken the polish for vanity. Then Nell told me his father had gone through half a year without work and Arthur liked to be able to see that a man had come prepared. I had watched him more kindly afterwards.
“The landlady will hold the rooms until June,” he said. “Provided we settle the terms next week.”
“June,” I repeated.
“The wedding,” Nell said.
“I know about the wedding.”
She smoothed the cloth over her knees.
Arthur glanced towards the dining room, where Ada’s voice was rising over another woman’s. “Your aunt seems very occupied.”
“She is.”
“Astonishing thing to risk trouble over a form.”
“You haven’t seen all the forms that pass through this house,” Nell said. “Mother has to answer questions for everybody.”
He smiled, taking it for a joke. “Not for much longer. Once we’re settled you’ll be able to put your feet up.”
Nell stopped moving her hand over the cloth. I saw what he meant before she answered: he was offering her release, and in that release he had imagined her with nothing to do.
“I could keep the accounts for more than one person,” she said.
“Of course.” He sat beside her again. “When there are children you’ll have enough accounts of your own.”
I went to the fire and poked it, although it did not need poking. It was a small cowardice. I could stand up to my sister over a servant’s wages more easily than I could allow a silence in my own sitting room.
“Would you both like cake?”
“Not just now,” Nell said.
Arthur accepted, because he had good manners and would never have guessed that cake might be a means of refusing to hear him.
Later, when the visitors had gone upstairs and my daughter was setting out the little bed beside mine, I asked whether she was content with the rooms.
“Yes. They get the morning sun.”
“And Arthur?”
“He gets it too, I imagine.”
I pulled a blanket straight. She laughed at last and put her cheek briefly against my shoulder. I had not earned that kindness, which made it especially lovely.
“He’s a good man, Mother.”
“I know.”
“But being grateful for a good man isn’t the same as agreeing with everything he wants.”
I stood with the blanket between my hands after she had gone to wash. I could not remember having said anything so sensible at twenty-four. I had chiefly wanted Thomas to find me pretty and my father to think him respectable. When both things happened on the same Sunday I assumed the rest of my life had been settled.
On Sunday morning Bessie came back before breakfast with an apron rolled under her arm.
I was on my knees in the hall, wiping water off the tray under the coats. She waited until I had stood up.
“Mrs Webb had a niece staying,” she said. “She’s going this afternoon. I told her I wouldn’t need my bed tonight, if you still need help.”
“And do you wish to help?”
“For money, yes.”
I liked her for that, too.
We agreed a shilling for the evening and breakfast work, with her food and the sofa in the back sitting room, if she chose to stay. She could go out in the afternoon. She was not to touch the pamphlet parcels unless she wished to. It was less ceremonial than the promises Ada and I had been making, and therefore considerably clearer.
“There’s another thing.” Bessie took a folded paper from inside the apron. “Not to ask you for it. Only so you understand why I couldn’t wait.”
It was a receipt from a chemist, eight shillings and sixpence, dated in March. At the bottom, in her own hand, was a note that the amount had been paid for Mrs Fenwick. There was a second receipt for a cab on a day Ada had not been able to walk to her own door.
“She meant to pay both back,” Bessie said. “She did ask me first. I said yes.”
“But you expected your wages.”
“Yes.”
Through the open dining-room door I could hear Ada laughing at something Mrs Wetherby had said. The sound was warm and unguarded. At home she had sat with those swollen fingers while William was away, not wishing to call on anyone who might see the money problem; Bessie had bought her medicine, taken her to the door, then gone back to a room where the rent could not be paid with anyone’s good intentions.
I had wanted someone simple to be angry with. It was going to be a disappointing weekend.
“Keep the receipts,” I said. “But show them to my sister.”
“She knows.”
“Then she must remember.”
When I brought the coffee in, Ada held out her cup. I filled it, put the pot down and sat next to her instead of going back for the toast.
“Bessie’s working for me tonight. For a shilling. I have advanced a pound of her wages.”
Ada looked towards the door. “I wish you had told me.”
“I am telling you.”
“You have made it sound as though I would not have paid her.”
“I have made an arrangement for work in my house.”
For a moment the old competition sprang up between us, complete and familiar: my smaller house, my fewer opportunities, my success in a matter in which she had failed. Then she reached for the butter with a hand which would not quite close.
I moved the dish nearer. She gave me one short, furious glance, accepted it, and said, “I shall have everything for her on Tuesday. And your pound.”
“Thank you.”
Across the table Mrs Wetherby was buttering a second slice. She kept her eyes on the bread. It was possible, I thought, that she heard everything and would only ever repeat what could do some good.
Nell came in with the post which had been left on Saturday behind Mr Harcourt’s paper. There were two circulars, a bill and an envelope bearing the neat handwriting of Mr Vale, who collected the rent on behalf of his aunt.
“Only a reminder,” Nell said, when she had read it. “He wants to know before the end of June whether we mean to renew in September.”
Ada reached for the envelope. “Your landlord?”
Nell kept hold of it. “The agent.”
“Then we must be careful what we say at the door.”
The idea was so startlingly sensible that I looked up. Ada was watching my daughter, not me. She had seen the blue cloth on Nell’s chair the night before. Perhaps she had even understood it.
“We must be careful what we promise in here as well,” Nell said.
Outside, the rain had stopped. On the pavement a boy was trying to make a reluctant dog walk towards church. The dog planted its feet, nose raised to a smell it would not abandon. I stood at the window for a moment and watched the boy first pull, then turn, then at last follow the animal a few paces in the opposite direction.
“Mother.”
Nell had put the letter beside my plate. On its back she had written our expenses for the week, in the pencil she knew how to keep sharp.
There was room below the total for the pound I had lent Ada.